AI Talent War Heats Up, Maimai CEO Predicts Tech Firms to Hire Only AI Talent Next Year

Lin Fan, CEO of Chinese professional networking platform Maimai, recently said that tech giants and top startups are fighting fiercely for AI talent in foundation models. Fresh graduates specializing in pre-training, post-training, and inference optimization can earn annual salaries of several million to ten million yuan. AI job postings on Maimai have surged 7.9 times this year, with 30-40% of current openings related to AI.

Lin believes most white-collar work can be done by Coding Agents, predicting that next year tech companies will only hire AI talent. He argues that employees using AI can be 2-3 times more productive, making them worth a 30% salary premium. His comments have sparked debate about AI replacing white-collar jobs.